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Enterprise-scale Backup and Recovery Solution for Microsoft SQL Server Released by Idera

Idera announced the release of SQLSafe version 1.1, a high-performance backup and recovery
solution for Microsoft SQL Server, early last week. SQLSafe, designed
specifically for MS SQL Server provides a fast, compressed and encrypted backup
and restore for multiple servers. In addition, it provides a central repository
of backup and restore information, rapid enterprise-wide deployment and
monitors execution in real-time.

SQLSafe
is a high-performance solution that writes data in a compressed format
resulting in significant improvement in execution time and storage requirements
over traditional SQL Server backups. A variable compression technology reduces the size of the
backup output files by a range of 70-95%, with 95% being the highest percentage
achieved in test cases. When it comes down to numbers, this means that a 100MB
database, for which three generations of backups are being kept, would only
require 30MB of storage space. The product supports four compression types
allowing the user to choose between low compression/fast execution time and
high compression/slower execution time.

A central
repository stores historical information about what backups ran, when they ran,
where the archive was stored, what compression algorithm was used, what
encryption was used, how long they took to execute--in other words, all of the
details about the backup.

The product
has been architected to deploy to hundreds or thousands of servers. A single
management console allows you to manage all of the servers and all of the
backup and recovery activities. It will auto-discover your servers with the click of a
button and run the backups without requiring manual installation on the
production servers. It is all done automatically.

From the management console, you also have the ability to
set global defaults for the type of encryption and type of compression by
either server level or database level. Then you can specify that the jobs
execute immediately or you can schedule them to be run in the background. The management console was
designed for use not only by highly experienced DBAs but also by junior
operators who are usually the ones on shift at 3AM when major problems occur.

Real-time monitoring is also built into the console
allowing you to monitor an entire stream of backup jobs, as they run, to see
how they are doing. In addition, the console has reporting capabilities,
providing a means to meet service level agreements that you might have on your
backup and restore activities.

The licensing model is simple. Idera charges $995
per SQL Server backup and they do not charge for restore.